Vice President Kamala Harris sought to appeal to female voters during an appearance on academic Brené Brown’s popular Unlocking Us podcast.
The podcast was filmed Friday, the same day Harris held a campaign rally in Houston in support of abortion rights. At the rally, pop superstar Beyoncé, her mother, Tina Knowles, and her former bandmate, Kelly Rowland, spoke in support of the Democratic ticket.
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Harris spoke on a range of issues on Brown’s podcast, including her family background as the eldest daughter of divorced parents, her long-term friendships and family, abortion rights, religion, and her moral argument against former President Donald Trump.
“This is not 2016 or 2020. He is also increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Harris said of Trump.
“Imagine the Oval Office in your head,” Harris continued. “Just imagine it on January 20 of 2025 if Donald Trump is sitting there, he will be stewing over his enemies list. Versus what I intend to do, which is sitting there thinking of the American people working on my to-do list. It’s a big difference.”
The vice president also told Brown that it is a “very real fear” that Trump could surround himself with loyalists if elected president again and pointed to his former chief of staff, John Kelly, warning that Trump met the definition of a fascist.
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“Look, the people who know Donald Trump best, who worked with him, members of his political party who worked with him inside the Oval Office, inside the Situation Room, who were his chief of staff, most recently, the one who spoke out, a four-star Marine general,” Harris continued. “His national security adviser, two secretaries of defense, and his former vice president have all said he is unfit to serve as president, and he is dangerous.”
Harris’s appearance with Brown also comes after Trump appeared on popular host Joe Rogan’s podcast, which has a wide male audience. After much criticism of hiding from the press and public in the early days of her campaign this summer, Harris has ramped up her media strategy with sit-downs with a range of journalists and podcasters and a CNN town hall event.
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The election is gearing up as a referendum on gender voting habits as Harris and her allies work to increase turnout among women by pointing to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, while Trump’s campaign leans heavily into masculinity themes to gin up support among male voters.
“We must be vigilant, and we have to remember that we can never take our rights for granted,” Harris said after Brown discussed pregnant women who skipped her talk in San Antonio to educators due to fear about the city’s abortion laws.
“Back to your point about talking with folks about whether they should get very activated around this election and knock on doors and tell people why they care and why it matters and why they should vote: This is the day,” Harris continued. “The notion that in the United States of America, in this year of our Lord 2024, that women don’t have the right to make decisions about their own body. I mean, what could be more fundamental?”
The nearly hourlong podcast also focused on more lighthearted topics including Harris’s fondness for Venn diagrams, her collaborative leadership style, her love of Sunday family gatherings, and her deliberate choice to fight to win the election.
“My lived experience is to know that the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us,” Harris explained before sharing a laugh with Brown. “Gen Z and others … they’ve got this whole meme about me and my, dare I say, obsession with Venn diagrams. I love Venn diagrams.”
As Harris reflected on this summer’s Democratic National Convention, she claimed that her ideology helped her to get into the ring for the presidency.
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“If you know what you stand for, then you know what to fight for, it’s not fighting for the sake of fighting,” Harris said.
“I stand for the freedom of women to make decisions about their own body,” she continued. “I stand for the fact that we should treat each other with dignity and respect. I stand for the proposition that we need to lift up working people and give them access to opportunity. These are the kinds of things I stand for. So I fight for them.”
